Amiga · C64 · Pravetz · Peripherals
Retro electronics repair
Anything with a board inside that once worked can usually work again. Old computers and the peripherals around them are more repairable than modern equipment, because they were built to be repaired.
Home computers from the 80s — Amiga, Commodore 64, Pravetz — all suffer from the same thing: leaking board batteries that eat the copper around them. The earlier it is caught, the less trace it leaves. Where corrosion has spread, traces get rebuilt: slow work, but it holds.
Peripherals are their own case. Floppy drives drift out of alignment and stop reading disks, keyboards start repeating or dropping keys, and joysticks lose contact in the microswitches. All of it is either still obtainable or can be made again.
What it covers
- Recovery from a leaked battery and board corrosion
- Capacitor replacement in computers and home systems
- Floppy drive repair and read-head alignment
- Keyboard, joystick and mouse repair — contacts and microswitches
- Power supply repair and cable replacement
- Mods for a modern monitor or a memory-card drive
What usually comes in
- The computer will not boot or shows a wrong startup screen
- There is green or white corrosion on the board
- The floppy drive will not read disks
- The keyboard drops keys or repeats them on its own
- It smells of burning after switching on